Semiautodidactic said:
DC_78 said:
I have never claimed that standard does not apply to me, personally. But I believe that you are trying to say it applies to the movement as if it is a hivemind. Which it is not. There is no Grand King of gamergate or central site that even coordinates strategy. Although here and 4chan seem to be the most likely sources for discussion of strategy and tactics. The Escapist is no more responsible for the worst bile filled forum post or thread than gamergate is to a random horrible tweet.
You are congregating and discussing 'strategy' and 'tactics'. There is collusion and discussion of how best to conduct this movement. You are coming to a consensus about how to best conduct yourselves, and you give each other marching orders and have plans for some nebulous endgame. As such, you are all very much responsible for the things that your movement says and does. You cannot sit and discuss 'tactics' openly and then turn around and say 'well, we're not responsible' when your movement is used for its full nefarious purposes. The fact that you're discussing 'tactics' at all indicates that your moves are planned in advance.
Also, as an unrelated tangent, I should point out that you 'gamergate' people are acting and thinking about this like you are a side in a war, while on the other side all you have is a bunch of people who think games should be more inclusive. There are no IRC chatrooms where Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian meet to discuss 'tactics'.
Why are there such discussions at all? What the hell does your movement gain about discussing 'tactics'? Don't you realize how creepy that looks to everyone on the outside?
As someone who has been contributing in the giant thread for a while now, I have to say what we have been doing most is sharing information. Pointing each other to new articles, videos, Twitter posts and information images. The main point of that thread is not a war-room to direct operations, but simply a chamber to make sure everyone is hearing all the news.
The only real 'tactics' that have ever been discussed were when we arranged to email website sponsors about the content of the websites they were advertising on. As far as I can remember that and the decision to use Twitter hashtags to counter the #deathtogamers twitter hashtag that the devs and journalists against us had already set up.
Our main actions other than that have been to keep telling each other to keep calm and not send harassing messages or use personal insults. Unfortunately because of the scale of this controversy it takes a lot of messages to get the point across (and unfortunately it doesn't always work as there are assholes who just want to insult and denigrate people, and because the movement is effectively anonymous we have no way of controlling the peace.) No one in the main thread knew about the PMs sent out today, no one could have done anything to stop them, and I am very sorry they were sent out, but that is the problem with having a debate in this jump in/drop out state across several websites. What gets said by people is for the large part uncontrollable, and due to it's scale there will be actual misogynists, actual trolls, actual people who just want to insult, hack or threaten, and we don't really have the power to combat that apart from telling them not to do it, and condoning it and apologizing when it happens, which is what we are trying to do as much as possible.
Our 'moves' aren't planned in advance. We simply wait to see the next piece of information that is revealed, and discuss its wider implications. There is no overall gameplan, no one has
any idea how this will end, how long it will take, or who will be implicated next. We are simply investigating the relationships and conflicts of interest that exist between indie developers and games journalists, noting and discussing what we find, and campaigning videogame websites for stricter rules regarding their journalists.
You say that Zoe Quinn / Anita Sarkeesian have no meetings to discuss tactics. First of all, Anita doesn't have anything to do with this protest at all. Her hands are perfectly clean. Secondly, there have been organised, concerted efforts launched against us. On the 28th August
11 websites all posted articles on a single day EDIT: [10 articels were posted in 24 hours] calling for the death of gamers. It was Zoe Quinn and Silverstring Media that organised the cutieskillingvideogames hashtag, T-shirts, [http://teespring.com/cuties] wristbands [] and badges. (organised to come out at the same time as the death to gamers articles), Zoe Quinn sleuthed 4chan chatlogs and created images to prove /v/ were evil, another guy posted a table on Twitter depicting 10 key words he had searched through the chat logs for, to show that 4chan cursed. If it is use of 'tactics' that concerns you, let me assure you, they have been in no way limited to us. The indie devs and journalists are making a concerted effort to silence us, using every tool at their disposal.
Finally, the abuse that we have received has not been from anonymous sources or from difficult to control members of the other side, but by the personal twitter accounts and articles of the professional journalists and professional developers. We are fully against any hate messages sent in the name of gamergate, and I am ashamed of the people that have harassed in our name, but the people that have been harassing on the other side are the big professional names, and they have repeatedly and unashamedly called us all sorts of unprofessional and horrible things, with no apologies or repentance: http://gamergateharrassment.tumblr.com/
I am truly sorry to everyone who saw abuse in this thread, and if it was someone who frequently posts in the big thread I would encourage you to name and shame, because no matter who they are they will be ostracised for doing such a hateful thing, but please don't tar us as extremists or haters.
We simply want more transparency in videogame journalism, we want more critical thinking and fact checking in articles, less biased stories and reviews and recommendations we can trust. It is very unfortunate that it has come to such a big clusterfuck, but escalation never comes from just one side, and as we have
